Zen and the art of Balance

 Welcome back, dear reader. I'm still not sure how you found this, I'm fairly confident I'm the only one who knows about it.

Today I want to discuss an oft discussed, and more often argued concept in gaming - Balance. There have been a few very recent turds in the punchbowl of balance as of the time of this writing, particularly with Games Workshop, but they won't be the only thing I talk about. I also hope to touch on some examples outside of miniatures, and look at some positive examples. Join me, won't you?

Codex Creep

This is a favorite topic among Warhammer players. Every month or two a new codex (book of rules) comes out for a different army in Warhammer 40k, and inevitably each codex is a little bit stronger. Or, rather, they're meant to be a little bit stronger. Some end up being a flop, and sometimes an army will spend multiple editions with mediocre rules. Currently, Chaos Space Marines are in this latter category. They weren't great in their last book, nor the book before that, and every other army has been consistently becoming stronger. It's not a great place to be if you're one of the players of a subpar faction. Currently, a few armies have gotten new books that are crushingly more powerful than previous books, and they've thrown things even more out of balance. Below I've thrown in a chart that groups armies by their win percentage in large, tracked tournaments so far this year. Before anyone comes at me with "not enough data" and "you can't tell anything from this", go cosplay as Nate Silver somewhere else. Yes, the data is trash. Yes, better players jump to the better armies which further skews things. It doesn't change the fact that if you play one of the weaker armies you're not going to have a good time if every match is being tabled by someone who has worked to eek out every advantage against you by playing optimal models in optimized strategies and has picked up the absolute most powerful army as part of this. It still sucks, and if power gamers gravitate towards an army that's a sign of a problem as well.

With a few exceptions, this is basically in chronological order. The edition started with space marines  (Space Marines are 7 of the bottom 8, the very bottom being an army without a 9th edition book) and Necrons (They're on I, next to two more Space Marine books), and Tau, Custodes, and Genestealer Cults have all gotten books this year (S++ tier and G Tier) while Tyranids got a buff in a campaign book (D-Tier).

With a spread ranging from some armies having a 30% win rate and others having 70%+, balance is quite clearly out of whack. It makes sense when you consider that some armies are playing at a power level from 3 or more years ago when every book essentially creates a new "best".

Personally I think this is pretty bad. The middle looks good, it might be okay if they cut the top and bottom 3 out? But overall I can't imagine Death Guard players are too happy with their 38%. 


Fortunately, GW has a lot of levers to pull and ways to pull them. Until recently, a week 1 errata/FAQ was pretty standard- an army came out and inevitably a few things weren't caught, so they quickly patched the rules to fix it. For some reason unclear to me this hasn't happened with the last few. They also do a big update every year called Chapter Approved, which is a book of point changes that impacts almost everything. On top of that, they've also made a habit of limiting models to prevent some more egregious balance problems. We saw this last edition with a limit to Crisis Commanders for Tau, more recently among Ork vehicles and planes, and generally in the "Rule of 3" that limits most things to no more than 3 in a single army.

The Leak

So a supposed leaked article came out earlier this month, stating that GW would be limiting the availability of some Tau models - particularly their battle suits - and only allowing one unit per army. They also had a few silly things like removing one of the Custodes heroes, and limiting them to two bike units (currently they can have 3). This has been called fake from multiple sources, and with all "leaks" it should be treated as such until it actually comes out. That said, given the above it really doesn't seem outlandish. It's one of many things GW has used in the past to maintain balance.

I don't have an image of the actual leak

AoS

Age of Sigmar has, likewise, been having some issues with balance recently. Rather than wait around, they instead added a new system to their tournament scenarios - players are rewarded points towards winning for killing "Priority Targets". Priority Targets are models that are considered maybe a bit too strong. Further, some armies have been given an extra bonus for doing this, to help the perceived weaker armies. This is... kind of an interesting patch. I'm not a huge fan of it, really, but maybe it will work out? I think ideally you wouldn't need to have different armies playing different scenario rules to keep things fair, but hey handicaps are a thing in sports I think sometimes maybe? I don't really know how... golf?... works.

Warmachine/Hordes

So this is the game I have the most experience with. I've played it for longer, and I've also done it with a focus on playing tournaments. I was initially introduced to it as a game where everything was crazy powerful, so balance was maintained by virtue of everyone having access to extreme models. People will remember playing into some MK 2 things like Haley2's feat being an absolute timewalk, or Gaspy2 crushing you with his feat... Denny2 feating and debuffing you and... okay feats were _big_. Usually your opponent had one big swing in their back pocket that they could use for an early lead, to kill your caster (army leader - they die and it's game over), punish you for over-extending, win on scenario... you get the idea. For the longest time I tended to play attrition focused armies, where I didn't rely on my feat to close out the game but to keep my opponent from killing my stuff for a turn, or to give me an early attrition edge etc.

WMH has changed quite a lot from then, though. Stronger things have been reigned in, stuff that used to be considered a negative experience (generally not being able to use your models) has been toned down and is more carefully considered. The end result is a game that plays a bit closer to Chess than Rocket Tag, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't still much closer to the Rocket end of the spectrum.

over 9000 hours in mspaint

I'm a pretty big fan of the caster kill mechanic in Warmachine. There's huge power in playing aggressively, but overextending means you might lose by caster kill. It also means players can play for multiple victory conditions, enabling lists that focus on caster kill as their goal. It also adds another axis to balance, with some armies being better at it than others (and some more prone to losing to it).

Currently WMH is moderately balanced. Some things are standouts in the power standings, though I think for the average game it's much better than it is at high level play. The game has had a few massive rebalancing efforts over the years, including a nearly game-wide round of changes in the fall. Unfortunately my main army for the last few years was nerfed quite a few times in a row, to the point where I just honestly can't have fun playing them any more. They were built around some mechanics that looked strong and felt bad, and had a severe degree of "Win more" if you were in the lead already. 

Guild Ball

This is an odd one. Guild Ball's issues with Balance seemingly lead to the developers getting upset and binning the game. Or, rather, they blamed the playerbase's reactions to balance for them cancelling the game. Players treated it as a highly competitive game, and models were either ubiquitous for being strong or called trash if they weren't in the top tier of models. In a game with small teams and small factions, problems with balance were heavily exploited by top players and became obvious - the game felt supremely solvable to many. 

Killer Instinct

Okay, not a wargame but hear me out. In 2020 a documentary came out chronicling the 2013 reboot of the Killer Instinct fighting game, and there's one section that I think is good for players of any competitive game to check out. The main point of it is that they decided to make Killer Instinct a competitive game with what we would call a "living ruleset". They constantly updated and tweaked balance to keep the metagame from getting stagnant, keep any one character from being too dominant for very long. It didn't always have this dynamic, though - originally they followed year long season where changes to the cabinet would come out and you'd play a season with things the way they are - 2013/2014 was dominated by two characters.

Later on in the documentary they discuss Jago, a character that had a fairly powerful healing ability. When he came out he was dominant, and players called for a nerf to his healing. The devs gave it space and studied the problem, and instead of touching his healing they changed how one of his kicks let him get up to close range. It took a little while for people to calm down, but eventually the meta was shaken up and Jago went from being dominant to being strong but having a few weak matchups.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks4eZoG94Vs&t=4391s

Closing thoughts

Well, dear reader, these have been my thoughts on game balance recently. Personally I'm a huge fan of living rules, closer to what Warmachine has or Killer Instinct had. 40k seems to be embracing this, as well, which I think is a solid sign that this is going to be the way of the future. Small frequent tweaks to how a model works seems like an ideal way to handle balance, but I think you have to approach it with that mindset from the start. If you've spent years not updating things routinely, your players are going to expect that. And if there's one thing players hate, it's changing the way you change the way things change. I think. 

P.S.
I had more sections planned. There was gonna be one where I point out Chess isn't actually balanced, which I think is worth considering. There are also games that are "balanced" by virtue of everyone having access to the same things (though there being some pieces better than others can lead to internal balance issues, some pieces being the "right" ones due to efficiency etc.). But I also planned to do one of these a week, and it's Tuesday and I haven't put one out yet for this week. So... yeah. I'm sure I'll have more to talk about with balance later on, and I hope there will be other things I come across that prompt me to write about them. Thanks again for reading, you non-existent person you.